The invention discloses a preparation method of an amino-acid ester or deuterated amino-acid ester compound, which comprises the following steps of: adding a photosensitizer and an organic solvent into a reaction container by taking imidic ester, silane and water or heavy water as initial raw materials, carrying out stirring reaction under the irradiation of blue light, detecting that the reaction raw material imidic ester completely disappears by TLC thin-layer chromatography, and filtering to obtain the deuterated amino-acid ester compound. And stopping stirring, removing the volatile solvent, carrying out silica gel column chromatography or neutral alumina column chromatography, and carrying out vacuum concentration to obtain the target amino-acid ester or deuterated amino-acid ester compound. According to the method, blue light catalysis is used for replacing traditional precious metal catalysis, silane and water are used for replacing a traditional hydrogen source for the first time, transfer hydrogenation of the imidic ester compounds is achieved, cheap deuterium water is used as a deuterium source, a series of deuterated amino-acid ester compounds can be prepared, and therefore the production cost is greatly reduced; the method provided by the invention has the advantages of mild catalytic conditions, simple catalytic system, high reaction selectivity, high safety and high synthesis efficiency, and is worthy of popularization and application.